Discover the strategic methods for
reaching your maximum potential as a doctor and never
have to worry about having enough income ever again.

Article #44 Apr. 2013

Why Doctors fail---Series
#6

“Your Talent and Skills Are Not Enough:
Only Business Team-Building Creates The Highest
Medical
Practice Income”

A
team of people can achieve far more than the sum
of the total of the individual’s skills alone. Wikipedia—2003 survey (HOW-FAR)

If you
discovered what factor it was in your medical
practice business that’s holding you back from a
much higher practice income, you probably would
do something to eliminate it… right? The problem
is a hell-raiser that, unfortunately, is almost
never recognized by physicians

in private
medical practice as a significant benefit… if
ever even considered.

“Teaming is
the engine of organizational learning.”

The
problem:
The concept of a “team building” being a fundamental
strategy for driving productivity,
propelling income,
and increasing efficiency for
physicians in a
private medical practice
business is rarely taken
seriously by doctors.

It’s one very
profound strategy that drives most
businesses
well beyond any expected level of success.
Your
playing on any sports team earlier in your life
should have already made the benefits of team
efforts obvious to you.

You aren’t
alone. This one issue likely reduces the
incomes
of over 95% of doctors in private medical
practice and they don’t
recognize it.

If you’ve
practiced for a few years, then you are also
seeing evidence in your own office of all the
symptoms pointing to lack of a true team
development effort
backing you up. Yet most
doctors find that it’s too much
of a strain to
replace employees that are persistently sucking
you dry and eating up your profits one way or
another, such as...

Repeatedly
late to work

Are gone
out of the office often for
personal reasons

Treat your
patients poorly

Never seem
to finish a task

Disregard
or forget your instructions

Fail to
offer any ideas for improvement
of your
office

And, you keep
on paying them anyway… ”Cause it ain’t that bad
of a problem.”

Dan S. Kennedy, business expert, often expresses
his advice about employee management, “Hire only
employees that are profitable to you... fire
the rest.”
If you don’t, you are giving consent
to yourself to
accept a significantly reduced
medical practice
income forever.

How’s a “team”
differs from the employee group you have now?

“A
team is defined as a group of people with
a full set of complementary skills required to
complete a task, job, or project.”

Team
members operate with a high degree of
interdependence.

Share
authority and responsibility for
self-management.

Are
accountable for the collective
performance.

Work
toward a common goal and shared rewards.

Commonly
you’ll find present medical office employees
that work independently, but by using their
knowledge from previous employment positions to
do the job you
ask of them. They feel no
accountability for collective performance of the
whole office crew, only
for themselves.

Each employee
works for their own objectives, not yours. There
are no common goals or shared rewards they are
working for. Your employees don’t have a clue
about
what teamwork (experiential education and
training) is
all about nor what it accomplishes
that they could share
in as well as become more
valuable as
an employee.

What does a
team accomplish that your medical office
employees will never accomplish?

Benefits of,
and why the interest in, team building and
development in a business environment...

They can
generate a wider range of ideas and
innovation
than individuals.

They are
able to motivate themselves.

They can
bounce ideas off each team member.

They often
take more risks than individuals.

They have
a range of personalities such as workers,
thinkers, leaders who contribute the right
balance
of skills necessary to achieve high
performance.

They
support each other and are not just
task-orientated.

They can
be a support mechanism which
provides
mentoring and allows others to grow
in
self-confidence and reliability.

If you have
the individuals with the potential to create a
high performance team, just imagine what they
could achieve for your medical practice
productivity and bottom line. Read more about
this at
www.callofthewild.com , a recognized British
Business Coaching Company and the
www.HarvardBusinessReview.com .

Designing a
successful business team

As you might
expect, productive teams are composed of
required elements to attain the desired business
results. First you must properly structure your
team, and then select the right type of team
member profile that fits the task. You wouldn’t
recruit people who hate marketing
to do a
marketing job. It means you have to know how
to
recruit the right members.

Required elements for team building...

Team
Goals:
Goals must be clear and specific
because the
focus of the team activities is organized
around those.

Commitment:
All team members must be fully committed
to
achieving the specific goals of that
team… no personal agendas allowed. One
rotten
apple will ruin the barrel
of apples.

Trust:
Successful teams must trust and rely on
the
other
team members for advice, feedback,
and
ideas.

Mutual
Respect:
Trust is not present among
team members
unless they adhere to mutual
respect for
each other.

Communication Intensity:
For efficiency and
speed of
action the
communication among all
members must be
a
high priority so that at any one time every
member knows what the other members
are
working on and the progress
being made
by them.

Specific
Roles for Each Member:
This process enables
each team member to
understand exactly
what they have
been
assigned to do and avoids duplication of
activities,
saves time, and keeps
each
member focused on their turf.

Shared
Rewards:
Team members must be involved
in
establishing team goals and understand that
they have a
stake (in the eventual results)
that is
significant and impressive. You
decide on what that
is, or those are.

Functional
Team:
All team members play on a
team, but
don’t
play as a team. Example, each
baseball
player has a fixed position and carries out
the functions of that position
by
themselves. It’s
the same model as an
assembly line activity. In business it’s the
same relationship as between
a supervisor
and employee.

Hierarchy
Team:
Team members work in unison
but require
a
leader. In football it’s often the
quarterback or defensive lineman. Each
member
has a fixed position but follows an
established play plan. Jobs can be done
quickly and
efficiently
because of high
flexibility. Each team member functions
independently but in unison with
the team.

Organic
Team:
Basketball Team members have a preferred
position, cover their teammates, and
adjust
their play according to the strengths and
weaknesses of other players. Organic teams
display synergy, uses the strengths of
other
members to minimize the weaknesses of
others,
but requires considerable
self-discipline and tamed ego
control. This
is the strongest team model.

This type of team has members who know how
to
carry out
the responsibilities of any
other team member… a common factor found in
most medical doctor offices. Each employee
has an intimate knowledge of the others,
which enables
them to
quickly adjust to
disruptions, emergencies, and disgruntled
patients.

With this
background information about team building
and
how they work to improve business growth,
efficiency, and productivity, you can begin to
formulate your ideas about implementing these
elements into
your own medical practice.

How to
implement teams into your medical
practice
business

For small
business or private medical practice offices the
average
2 to 8 employees limits some of your
options for creating team functions within your
practice, but leaves you with at least two
excellent opportunities.

First,
you would best advised to implement an office
team composed of every employee you have
into a
top rate team with
a single assigned goal
to accomplish.

A few highly important
goals
could be to create a marketing system for your
medical practice that can be then used for years
afterward, create a
unique system
for doctor
patient referrals to your business, or create
a
powerful patient recruiting system directly from
the community and from your own patients.

Second,
create a team using the employees from several
medical offices. Those doctors would have to
agree to cooperate in the process and all the
offices participating could then benefit from
the process as well as yours. The prime
advantage to all the medical offices involved
would be that the system devised by
the team
effort would be taken back to their offices and
taught
to the other employees… a-win-win.

The great
benefit to the team members is that they are
involved
in an “experiential training and education”
process which would
give them a
knowledge that would qualify them for the best
jobs
in the best offices later on… as well as
the highest salaries.

Once you have
selected the special people for your team
building ideas based on their personal
commitment to maximize the goals you have in
mind, you have the task
of training the team
about what you intend for them to
do and how you
want it done.

It goes
without saying that you (the doctor and boss)
must be knowledgeable about team building work
activities and processes, how to lead them
through the team training process step by step,
and be able to
support the business team on a
continuing basis.

It may be a big job for you,
but the end result will likely blow
your mind as
to how fantastic your medical practice will
become
over time.

It’s not a
pipedream. It’s a method for you to rocket your
medical practice quickly to the top. The proof
of the value of using
business teams for the
improvement of any business is beyond debate.

Your
extraordinary advantage of doing what 99%
of
other doctors are not doing puts you in a
position which allows you all
the opportunities
for expanding your
medical practice business
that other doctors won’t have
or
ever
know
about.

As with any
medical practice small business plans for
improvement, it begins with hard work and
considerable time spent. Once your team has
reached the goal you
set, you are at the perfect
spot to do the same thing
over again, often with
the same team that no longer
needs trained, with
a new goal to go after... one after
the other.

When you are
familiar with the essentials of creating a
business team, you can then modify them to meet
your practice needs.

At present your employees
work in a segmented job environment
with the
often usual and inadequate communications with
each other, distaste for helping
each other at
times, and agenda to
work towards their
own
ends.

You can try to
use your present employees to build a
team, but
you must remember that you will have to
first
remove all their personal agendas in their work,
persuade them to work as a team dependent on
each other, create their trust in you that they
may not have, remove their previous work habits,
and most
importantly, be sure they are all
committed to the
goals you give them.

Another option
is to hire experts in business “team
building” and “team development.” Their
obligation to
you is long term. They don’t
simply jump into a project, teach and train your
team, and leave the rest to you.
You can imagine
the cost for this being
done for you,
but it
certainly would be worth the cost to any
medical practice.

The bottom
line is that you have to be 100%
committed
to the process if you intend to use
business teams for improvement of your income.
Otherwise, don’t do it.
You will be very
disappointed
if you are not completely committed
to the process from the beginning and for
long
term.

Comments

Persuading
stiff-necked medical doctors to use well
documented and reliable business team methods
is about as easy as asking them to go over
Niagara Falls
in a barrel.

The same is true
about persuading physicians to get an MBA
sometime before they enter private practice.
There is no denial that having both available
would put you in the top 1% of practicing
medical doctors in our country… in earnings and
career satisfaction.

The truth is
that with ObamaCare in effect it will be so
restrictive to private practice doctors in the
future that the only way you will survive in
private practice financially will be to grab and
use these kinds of ideas and methods I’ve
mentioned and those I haven’t told you
about
yet.

One such
method that can permit you to survive, in my
opinion, is Concierge (cash only) medical
practice. Two of my articles in the
article archives on my website discuss
this
method.

The physician
mind today is not about finding more chores to
do outside of seeing patients, understandably.
The ferocious pressure on you to give up private
practice and become a physician employee is
overwhelming.

However,
we older doctors know
that the freedom to practice medicine as we
choose was key to deciding to become a doctor in
the first place. What motivates the new doctors
to become a medical doctor today?

It was such a
privilege to be able to practice medicine at a
time when freedom to practice as we liked was
possible. For that I am thankful.

Using
your present employees to build a
team for your medical practice may
demonstrate to you that your present
office staff may be entirely
different than what
you expected.

Nursing them along
may eventually end up a
stinking mess.

However, when they are
all are tuned in to the same
objective and all work together
uniformly using their God given
various talents, you will be
obligated to continue your
supervision and instruction until
the end goal is reached. When your
team is dressed out in similar
office uniforms, it's even more
impressive.

In Every Issue:

1. Powerful Business and Marketing Articles
You Can Easily Adapt to Your Own Medical Practice.

2. Dr. Graham's Practice Views And Opinions That Should
Provoke New Ideas For You to Act on.

6. Practice Ideas And Tips For
Improving Your Practice
Income
And Efficiency.

7. Library Of My Views About Medical
Practice. Practice
Alternatives, Problem Solutions, And The Things You
Should Do and Should Not Do.

8. List Of My Medical
Business Websites Meant To
Offer You Another Whole New Look AT How Your Medical
Practice Interacts With Other Medical Career Demands +
Responsibilities.

9. Humor In Small t.i.d. Doses. Meant to lighten your
stress load, if even for just a few minutes.

Profitable
Practice Tips

1. Over 60% of your new patients come to you by other doctor
referrals---do you think that creating
a system for getting referrals from other doctors might be a
good idea?
Read more here.......
article 13article 14

2. If you recognize from what you
read and hear that hospitals, managed care industries, and
the medical education hierarchy are rapidly evolving into
what is called "team" medical care, "team" supervision, and
"team" healthcare delivery structures-----
do you think it would be something
that you should learn about working in teams?

"There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the
whole government working
for you."

---Will Rogers

Goals -
Plans

Forecast #1 from
2013 on:Robot development is likely
to dramatically accelerate because of new open-source
hardware-sharing systems. Costs my plummet and innovation
may skyrocket. A caregiving robot costs over $350,000 and
soon be available for under $25,000.
(The Futurist World Society publication 2013)

Can you imagine
having your personal robot, armed with your knowledge and
instructions that can attend all the hospital committee
meetings
for you?

Inspiration Time

"The power of imagination makes
us infinite"

---John
Muir

Views I Only
Share With My Friends--

What my medical career
taught me.......Click Here...and how it can help
you manage your medical practice business at
the
highest level of expertise.

Facts
And Stats

1. The first owner of the Marlboro Company
died of lung cancer.

2. The farthest
you can get from a McDonald's in the USA: 107 miles as the
crow flies, 145 miles
by car.

3. Yahoo--was originally called, "Jerry's
Guide to the World Wide Web."

What Your
Kids Are Capable Of-

When you want to understand
what your
modern day kids are capable of and have the ability to
do, regarding starting a
business of their own, then hit
the link below and give yourself a dose of inspirational
enlightenment.....

Note:I have no personal or
business connections with these references
other than subscriptions to their
publications. I suggest them because I
do think they have unique value for investors.
You decide.